Fixing Your Earth - 017 Getting Back Your Excitement

Laziness Due To Earth-of-Fire-of-Earth:  Lack of Aspiration

We have so far explained the different kinds of laziness that stem from earth-of-fire-of-earth.

The elements of fire and water are opposing elements, and so are wind and earth opposing forces. Earth is dry, heavy and non-moving, while wind by contrast is moist, light and moving.

Earth and fire are different in that earth stays dormant where it is, while fire seeks to ascend. All the elements contain the others, so since earth contains fire, there is also fire-of-earth. The fire-of-earth creates a contradiction in the soul, because earth has a nature to weigh things down, while fire has a nature to ascend.

When a person feels this contradiction and he becomes lazy, his laziness is coming from the fire-of-earth in the soul. When earth weighs down the fire, the person feels laziness from this. He feels ‘weighed’ down and thus loses his excitement to grow spiritually.

We have so far described the problem: when a person feels somewhat ‘heavy’ inside [due to varying factors, as we described in the previous chapters], which breeds on his laziness to feel a lack of aspiration to grow. Now we will describe the solution.

4-A] Solving Lack of Aspiration: How To Excite Ourselves

Fire cannot ascend unless it gets ignited from something. Therefore, we need to ignite our ‘fire’, via the means of excitement and enthusiasm, and get our inner ‘fire’ going.

Our soul contains three general layers – action, speech and thought. The actions are on the outer layer of our soul; speech is a more inner layer of the soul, and thoughts are the most inward layer. When we ‘ignite’ our actions with some enthusiasm, we can use that to get further into our realm of speech, and after we have ignited our speech, we can work our way into our thoughts and ignite our thoughts with excitement.

When we give ourselves enthusiasm – using the element of ‘fire’ within our actions, speech and thoughts – we counter our feeling of heaviness\laziness that stems from our element of earth.

Step One: Enthusiastic Actions

In order to infuse enthusiasm into our words and thoughts, we first need to have enthusiastic actions. When our actions become fiery with enthusiasm, our element of fire is able to ascend into the realm of our words and thoughts.

Therefore, by doing something enthusiastically, our enthusiasm can extend into our speech, and from there it can extend into our thoughts. To work on this, whenever we perform an action, we should put our heart into it, and that will in turn ignite our action to become enthusiastic.

Step Two: Enthusiastic Speech

After a person works to put heart into what he does and thus come to perform his actions with enthusiasm, the next step is to infuse enthusiasm into ourselves using our power of speech.

If a person wants to put enthusiasm into how he speaks, he can work on this practically by making sure to be precise in his words; so he should think before he talks about what words he will say and how he will say it. In this way, the words he says become more alive and infused with vitality.

Without doing this, a person only becomes enthused in the superficial sense, and he will only be able to reach the outer layer of his heart’s enthusiasm. Only by being exacting with the words that come out of our mouth can we reach the inner layer of our heart.

For example, when we verbalize the Gemara or the words of mussar, and we are trying to affect our heart through the words we are saying, it won’t suffice just to read it enthusiastically. We need to read the words with precision (which is called “diyuk”), and through that, the words can penetrate into our heart, and then we can become truly enthused.

Step Three: Enthusiastic Thoughts

Infusing our heart with enthusiasm through our action and speech is something that all people can work on, but getting enthusiasm into our very thoughts is harder to accomplish. Therefore, most people aren’t able to use their thoughts to enthuse themselves, and they will only be able to make use of either action or words that are enthusiastic, in order to feel enthused.

However, the more a person grows and matures in Torah – not just in knowledge, but when he makes sure that he is always “thinking in learning” – he will be able to bring himself enthusiasm through his thoughts as well.

When we use our layers of action, speech and thought together in order to give ourselves enthusiasm, we use the excitement contained in the nature of our soul’s fire to its fullest, and this weakens the heaviness coming from the nature of our soul’s earth (in particular, the lack of inspiration, which stems from earth-of-fire-of-earth).